My UP Trip ! (Part I - Day 1) - Brindavan

Dear Readers, 

Good to meet you after a very long break.

Last week I took my first vacation in 4 years, with my last vacation plans to Tadoba in 2020 cancelled just as Covid had started peaking.

This trip was kind of extensive and long with 4 of us visiting Vrindavan, Ayodhya, Prayagraj and Kashi (aka Benares / Varanasi) for over 8 days.

First, started with our Pune- Delhi flight and caught a cab to Vrindavan. The Delhi-Vrindavan flight duration was around 3 hours, and we reached Vrindavan by around 3 pm. The driver spoke to me and got to know of our plans and was keen to drive us to Mathura and mainly Ayodhya which is a drive of 8+ hours from Vrindavan. But we managed to keep him at bay.

One of the novelties for us in this tour is that we had booked home stays instead of hotels which was beneficial from a cost point of view but also gave some uncertainty on the quality of the stays.

It was cold in UP in all the places where we went. Stay in Vrindavan was in a Home Stay flat and the family felt too cold in the apartment and there was no heater. But they had kept thick comforters (aka Rajais in Hindi) with which we managed to keep ourselves warm.

In Vrindavan went to the actual Yamuna banks where Krishna had actually hanged out with the Gopis and the guide also pointed to a tree on the banks where Krishna kept the stolen clothes of the Gopis. It was a goosebumps and scintillating moment to be in the same place where Lord Krishna had done his Leelas. We then went to the actual Vrinda-van, meaning the forest of Vrinda trees. (Vrinda is a type of Tulsi, but not edible). It was more of a garden rather than forest. All the trees there had intertwined in pairs and there were no single trees. This is the actual spot where Lord Krishna used to hang around with the Gopis. There were so many monkeys in all the places where we stayed in Vrindavan and also in the temple areas. The guide said the monkeys in Vrindavan were naughty just like Krishna and those in Ayodhya were polite like Rama which I am not sure of since we saw naughty monkey behaviours in Ayodhya also! In the Yamuna banks, we saw a monkey pull a small girl down by her skirt and make her fall just for the heck of it and they were also stealing the monkey caps of the visitors just for the heck of it. Some tourists were suggesting to one of the cap-losers to give Frooti to the monkeys so that they will give him back his lost cap. (But did not wait to see the end of the story)!

One of the humbling sights in Vrindavan was people doing some kind of circumambulation called parikrama around the temples in the streets surrounding the temples. This is due to the fact that it is not exactly circumambulation ( meaning walking) but they did sashtanag namaskars for the entire circumference of the temple. Meaning , they will do a sashtaang namaskar, then get up and walk to the point where their tip of the head or the hand was during the previous namaskar and do another sashtaang namaskar and so on till the entire circumference is covered. The thought of the amount of devotion needed to do it and the sight of it were indeed overwhelming!

After Brindavan, we went to visit Bankey Bihari, the famous temple of Krishna. The lanes were so narrow and crowded and confusing and many of the lanes has been made one-way. My wife and mother-in-law gave up and waited just outside the temple due to the crowds, while me and Rishabh (son) entered and exited the temple after having a hurried Darshan! Rishabh being the devotee he is, was excited and satisfied by his visit to the temple and seeing the God. He also did the typical ISKCON gesture of lifting both hands high in the air at the deity !

Next we planned to visit Prem Mandir, one of the new age temples of Vrindavan build in the early 2000s. But it was too crowded. Any vacation will have highlights and lowlights and we faced some lowlights on the first day evening. We dropped the idea of visiting Prem Mandir after looking at the crowd and started looking for a place to eat our dinners. We went into a food-court but the quality of the restaurants there were not impressive and we managed to eat something to manage the night. After that we had a journey back to our homestay in an open e-rickshaw in the very cold temperature. Our e-rickshaw driver insisted that he needed to have a beedi so that he can drive in the cold. After we reached the home, we asked the owners and organizers for a room warmer but finally managed to spend the night snuggled into our rajais.